help: Locally Archiving 30 years of Mac Email

[jesse_the_k]

I like having a written record of what happened, to supplement my memory.

I switched form Eudora to Mac Mail in the last millennium. I've had at least a dozen email addresses. I've faithfully downloaded everything to my local Mac (IMAP, not POP--I may be old fashioned but I'm not a masochist). I'm more cavalier with my iOS Mail since I know the master version will be on my Mac.

I have 7 gigabytes of *.mbox and sipped *.mboxes.

I know that Mail will be happier if I have fewer "active" messages. Can I somehow export and then delete emails from Mail without losing them?

My search has found no massively helpful article. I want "Take Control of Archiving Your Email" to exist. Can you point me to a step-by-step, handholding resource that will slim down current Mail while still permitting me to read that email I sent to my doctor in 1999?

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm wondering if the answer is .json

I still have to figure out how to use .json but it was suggested as a potential for a different and yet not That Different situation.

[jesse_the_k]

*shudders*

I'm gonna scale Mount Grep before I even think of .JSON

[green_knight]

I don't use mail ever since Mail ignored the 'I will download things to your computer' setting and deleted emails from the server instead, so I can't give you an exact answer, but here are some things I've encountered in the quest for e-mail bliss (and hard drive space):

- ideally, test this on a second computer so you're playing with a backup before you commit to your main machine

Access: if you don't want to use those e-mails _as emails_ ever again, all you need to do is confirm whether you can read the contents with TextEdit. (If you can, that means you can later use more sophisticated tools for search/grep). (Eudora's .mbx format was more or less plain text; no idea about Mail)


Restoration: This is where it can get tricky. For some programs, all you need to do is put the mailbox to where the application can find it. For some, there's an import function. For some, there's some g'damned trickery that can lead to extended bouts of cursing until you figure out the trick when you promptly forget it when you need it again, two years later.

The really really really important thing is that if you experiment with restoring old e-mails (load/open/whatever) to turn fetching e-mails off, because if you download new mails you can REALLY mess things up for yourself. Ask me how I know.

Google tells me that 'export mbox/import mbox' is relatively pain free, so things are looking good, but I'd still proceed with caution. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/a-better-way-to-archive-email-in-apple-mail/

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for your hard-earned wisdom.

I've realized that I mis-stated my problem. What I really need is A System for Deciding what email I can toss. Ugh.

[green_knight]

For me, 'toss' means 'back it up to an external drive in case I miiiiight want to see it again, so these are functionally the almost same.



(I find it helps to sort things by sender and check for any newsletters of campaign e-mails I haven't deleted; it's a drop in the bucket, but it helps me any time I feel I need to sort things NOW.)

[squidgiepdx]

You can create a new mailbox on your mac and import your mail into that mailbox. I did the same with 10 years of work email when I changed jobs. :)

[esteefee]

that's a nicely elegant solution.

[squidgiepdx]

Thank you :)

Mac wants to save the email in the cloud by default. But just creating a local Mac mailbox works really well. Only bad thing is, since it's on your local machine, it's not backed up to the cloud by default. But with the Mac, if you just turn on Time Machine and plug in a USB drive, you're golden. :)

[esteefee]

yis! I love Time Machine.

[jesse_the_k]

Excellent suggestion! Makes sense, and easy to implement -- thank you.

But what I realized is that I mis-state my problem. What I really need is A System to Choose Which Mails I Care about. Every attempt to tackle this question had resulted in me down the rabbit hole of USENET threads from 1996. Which is enjoyable in itself, but gets me no nearer the answer.